This is Sudhir Patwardhan’s “Young Applicant,” 2005.

For those in the New York area, they have till March 4 to see Patwardhan’s and Gieve Patel’s paintings on display at the Bose Pacia Gallery. A few days ago, I read Holland Cotter’s brief notice on the exhibition and was struck by his description of Patwardhan’s aesthetic: “I have admired Mr. Patwardhan’s work since I first saw it in a group exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery in 1985, and have eagerly sought it out since. His painting might be considered a form of Socialist Realism, minus ideological hard-sell or an agony-or-ecstasy tone. Instead, he paints everyday, unprivileged urban lives with a solidity of form and a deliberateness of pacing that imbue even crowd scenes with a ceremonial, moral weight.”

In fact, Cotter is in good form and two days later, on Feb 26, he wrote an excellent piece entitled “What Does Islam Look Like?” Among the many fine observations scattered through his review of a show comprising of artists from Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey was the following one: “Most of these artists are tagged Islamic because of their backgrounds. Yet much of their work is far less about Islam itself, as a religion or culture, than about their relationship to Islam — in some cases it is close and positive; in other cases, distant and critical. But in most instances, it is ambivalent — the opposite of how Islam is treated these days in the larger world [my emphasis]. In these works, images and forms associated with Islam, far from being sacrosanct, are invitations to individualistic and unorthodox experimentation, to examine and play with Islamic identity without being confined to it.”

The piece below is Shirin Neshat’s “Speechless” (1996), also reviewed in the same essay.